I’ve often thought that if I could have the perfect job it would be that of a movie detective, a sleuth whose sole function was to track down rare, lost, or just rumored to exit movies. Yeah, I know this is shades of The Ninth Gate, but hey, its cool no matter how you carve it.
Needless to say I was absolutely thrilled to learn of the found footage from Metropolis, one of my all time favorite films ( I was lucky enough to see it at Jacob Burns with the Allow Orchestra providing the score). I am similarly enthralled by all and any news related to the long lost London After Midnight. It could should come as a shock that I have waited with baited breath to hear any little scrap of news concerning the story that circulated about the lost print of King Kong that was found in a London theater…8 YEARS AGO.
You see, it was 2010 when sites started reporting that the a print had been found in a UK cinema in Glasgow. It was also then that many started speculating that the print might contain the long lost Spider Canyon footage, footage that was apparently too gruesome for audiences in the 30s.
Shortly after the article was released reports started coming in that the footage was celluloid, not nitrate, meaning that that the film, although old, was probably from the 50s, not the 30s as speculated. And then…all fell silent. The story for all intents and purposes was dead in the water. No new conjecture, and no report on anything new at all that the footage might have had for serious fans. Well, that was until yesterday when blogspot blog robojapan reran their article from 2010 AND a reader commented on the Grosvenor footage stating that indeed, NOTHING NEW. In fact, this reader actually saw the footage at the Grosvenor so unfortunately, I think, until we’re told otherwise, this one is as dead as the mighty Kong himself.
